Another dumb question about ranks

[DukeOfPrunes]

Say I am playing in Gold rank.
All my opponents are supposed to be Gold? (Or maybe Silver or Platinum?) Who knows?

Another question: I agree that climbing the hill is more and more difficult. That's because opponents are stonger, or because the winning runs reward less points? Or both? Thanks.

[Xyntech]

I wonder that too, because sometimes I get some really strong or some really weak opponents at ranks I wouldn't expect to see them. But then again, just because a player is ranked at a certain level doesn't mean they can't make a build that's unusually good or bad.

As far as I know, you only pull opponents from the rank you are currently at. If I'm wrong about that, it would have to be only the occasional player from 1 rank above or below you, because mostly the skill levels are on point.

As you rank up, you do get fewer points for wins. At Bronze, you can practically fail your way to Silver. But even if you rank up at a slower rate, as long as you win more than you lose you'll be able to get quite high in rank.

Difficult opponents are the primary reason you'll have a harder time ranking up. Winning against high ranking players becomes much more of a challenge and any losses can set you back significantly.

Aside from a few overtuned classes and builds, the game is mostly putting you where you belong rankwise. Unranked games can sometimes be more fun, just to mess around trying novel build ideas. Unless you like the grind and the challenge of it, climbing the ranks can eventually become a chore for some players.

The devs have some kind of plan in the early access roadmap to revamp the rank system, but we have no idea what that means or when that will happen. You can bet if they do revamp the rank system, they'll reset everyone's rank, as they'll also undoubtedly do again when the game leaves early access. So whatever you do, don't get too attached to your current rank or waste any time grinding it up if you're not having some fun doing it.

[Darth Lunar]

Does anyone know at what ranking exactly builds get cached, and roughly for how long/how many opponents?
If someone is high Master, for example, and gets an incredibly lucky build putting them into Grandmaster, then does that build get cached as a Master build or as a Grandma build?
If Grandma, then a lot of the power spike between ranks is due to sheer luck, with lucky Master builds appearing in Grandma and unlucky Grandma builds appearing in Master. This would be true at every rank boundary, although to a less noticeable extent.

It doesn't really affect the player's overall rank, but it would lead to most losses being to worse players that simply got luckier than you, rather than to players who are actually better. I've been wondering if something similar to this effect explains most people's frustration with the ranking system.

I'm not sure if caching builds at the player's previous ranking would entirely avoid this problem either though. I feel like I'd need to do some statistical modeling to see all the effects. Ranking systems kinda work on the assumption that past luck balances itself out in future games, but I don't think luck can balance itself out if lucky wins (or unlucky losses) get reused for future games.

Imagine a ranking system for a racing game, where you race ghosts of other racers, except the speed of the cars is random. Eventually, the fastest ghosts will all mostly be the ones that luckily got the fastest cars. The longer ghosts get cached, the more pronounced and frustrating this effect will become. This is true even though such a ranking system does accurately place all the racers according to their relative skill, given enough races.